At an HIV Leaders meeting to re-energise global efforts against HIV/AIDS, held at the House of Lords, London, on 9 March, Dr Jorge Bermudez, Executive Secretary of UNITAID, stressed the crucial contribution of innovative financing and new tools to keep the momentum and promise on universal access to AIDS treatment and care.

During the meeting - hosted by the United Kingdom's Department for International Development (DFID) and attended by representatives from African countries, heads of donor agencies, activists, people living with HIV, and the pharmaceutical industry - Dr Bermudez identified three key priorities to carry the access effort to the next level:

1. As consensus grows on the need to start treatment earlier in order to prevent further infections but also to ensure better therapeutic effect, the number of people in need of immediate treatment could double from today's 10 million to 20 million;
2. The need to respond to a changed intellectual property environment to ensure that people with HIV in developing countries can stave off early resistance and live beyond the lifespan of first-line treatments; and,
3. The vital role of innovative financing for health in order to maintain or increase funding levels for AIDS. The bulk of UNITAID's funding (over 70%) comes from a small levy applied to airline tickets in a number of countries; but other sources, such as financial transaction levies need to be pursued.

UNITAID's efforts to address these priorities have concentrated on remedying market failures such as: medicines that do not exist in the right formulation, are not produced in sufficient quantities or are too expensive; i.e. paediatric medicines in fixed-dose combinations and second-line medicines.

In addition, UNITAID is in the process of establishing an AIDS medicines patent pool, due to become operational this year, which will further help speed up the availability of low cost and better adapted treatments for people with AIDS. The UK International Development Minister, Gareth Thomas, called on the "pharmaceutical industry to help avert a treatment crisis by signing up to the UNITAID patent pool to make effective drugs affordable for developing countries."